State confirms 10th meningitis case

State Health Department lab technician Ruth Rutledge packages cerebrospinal fluid of Minnesota meningitis patients to send to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta for further testing. (AP Photo/Hannah Foslien)

As the case count continues to grow in Minnesota and across the country from a fungal meningitis outbreak, a state health official said it's too soon to say whether the numbers will start leveling off anytime soon.

On Tuesday, Oct. 30, the Minnesota Health Department reported the state's 10th confirmed case of fungal meningitis linked to a nationwide outbreak. The patient is a woman in her 60s, said Doug Schultz, a department spokesman.

Federal officials have linked the outbreak to a contaminated steroid medication that was used by patients in 19 states, including patients treated at six pain clinics in Minnesota. As of Tuesday, 363 people had been sickened in an outbreak that now includes 28 deaths.

The implicated steroid was manufactured by a Massachusetts firm called New England Compounding Center.

Federal officials have suggested the risk of fungal meningitis drops significantly once a patient reaches the 42-day mark after exposure, said Richard Danila, an epidemiologist with the Minnesota Health Department.

Since the medication was recalled in late September, the timeline would suggest that the risk of new cases should start declining after another week or so, Danila said.

But the 42-day mark is based on the experience of patients in Tennessee, where those sickened have reported more acute illnesses than in Minnesota, Danila said. Just as health officials aren't sure why strokes and deaths happened in Tennessee but not in Minnesota, they're not sure if the timeline for the risk of illness might vary, too.

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"Even at 42 days, we may not be out of the woods yet," Danila said.

Plus, health officials still aren't sure whether other medications from New England Compounding Center will be conclusively tied to fungal meningitis cases.

Health officials in Minnesota have been tracking one case of apparent meningitis in a patient who received one of these other medications, Danila said. But initial test results have come back negative for a fungal cause.

"That doesn't mean he doesn't have fungal meningitis," Danila said. "It's just that all the tests were negative."

Federal officials have their eyes on about a dozen similar cases, he said, where they suspect meningitis symptoms are linked to fungal contamination in other products from the Massachusetts company.